Stuff

Going Down With the Brown

Milk, Milk, Lemonade, Around the Corner Fudge Will Murder You

By Harry Cheadle, Illustrations by Johnny Ryan



As you read these words, millions of people are purging fecal matter into or onto toilets, holes, ditches, bogs, quicksand, oceans, Honda Civics, sinks, urinals, troughs, wooded areas, grass, dumpsters, trash cans, statues of the Virgin Mary, nostrils, mouths, armpits, feet, vaginas, penises, someone else’s butthole, pets, cheese, and whatever else you could think of. Add animal dung into the mix, and it’s obvious that we are in the throes of a serious excrement epidemic that you may not be aware of.

So allow me to inform you: One day—and it could very well be someday soon—we will experience a global sewage backup so severe that a turd tsunami will devastate the world over, literally laying waste to every village and metropolis in its path. Rivers of poop will submerge islands and rise up hundreds of feet, eventually cracking the windows of the penthouse apartments of the last survivors until they slowly drown in a foyer full of diarrhea.

Don’t believe it? Well, brothers and sisters, have I got news for you. Crap has already declared war, and it’s winning. Behold just a few of the innumerable examples of how shit can kill.
 

  
     
WORMS FROM RACCOON TURDS
Raccoon poo typically contains millions of roundworm eggs per pellet. If the parasites happen to enter the guts of a human, they will make a beeline to the brain, lay more eggs, and cause nerve damage and death as they squirm through synapses. Raccoons instinctively construct “latrines” where the digger and his or her friends do their business, and these stool depositories tend to be located underneath decks, on roofs, and in garages. These concentrated packages of fecal poison are scattered all over suburban North America, left by furry, ring-tailed terrorists. Those with young children who will stick anything in their mouths should take heed: Be very careful and wear gloves and protective masks when cleaning up raccoon droppings. One small oversight and Junior could end up with a skull full of worms. This is shit’s plan to destroy our babies from the inside out. I encourage you to take up arms and wipe away doo-doo wherever it may cross your path.		   TORRENTS OF HORSESHIT
A horse produces 15 to 35 pounds of road apples a day. Before automobiles, cities like New York had more than 100,000 horses hauling people and cargo from place to place, which equates to at least 750 tons of feces dropped every 24 hours. According to the 1997 book The Making of Urban America, “The manure was everywhere, along the roadway, heaped in piles or next to stables, or ground up by the traffic and blown about by the wind.” New York dealt with these unseemly piles by licensing “dirt carters” to haul the shit to designated dumps, which would attract flies and odors for months and sometimes years. After it rained, the filth would pool in rivulets and puddles throughout the streets. Even worse, the city had to deal with a surplus of horse corpses in addition to their shit and often dumped the bodies in nearby rivers. What’s more, thousands of people died from feces-related diseases every year. So the next time someone bitches about the “evil of oil,” remind him or her of yesteryear and that the internal combustion engine was one of humanity’s greatest victories in the Great Excreta War.
By Harry Cheadle, Illustrations by Johnny Ryan 4 months ago More from this issue

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